Covid-19 bites: The Philippines revises economic targets

Worst recession: A sales assistant working at a shopping mall. The disruption in economic growth and poverty reduction is manifested in the downscaled socioeconomic targets for 2022. — Bloomberg

MANILA: President Duterte’s final year in office became doubly challenging as the Covid-19 crisis reversed much of the pre-pandemic gains made toward the administration’s goals to sustain robust economic growth, reduce joblessness and move up to upper-middle income country status.

The pandemic last year inflicted the Philippines’ worst post-war recession as gross domestic product (GDP) shrank by a record 9.6%, while pushing the unemployment rate to a 15-year high of 10.3% or 4.5 million jobless Filipinos at the height of the longest and most stringent Covid-19 lockdown in the region.The state planning agency National Economic and Development Authority (Neda) had taken stock of the pre-pandemic accomplishments while downscaling some of the more ambitious socioeconomic targets in light of the pandemic, through the updated Philippine Development Plan (PDP) 2017-2022 it released early this year.